Tuesday, 29 October 2013

Radio Lives – Tom Vernon

There are
two indisputable facts about Tom Vernon. One, he was a fat man. Two, he rode a
bicycle. That combination gave Tom a number of hugely popular series on radio
and on television as he explored the highways and byways across France and
around the world.

It all
started with the Radio 4 series that first aired in late 1979, Fat Man on a Bicycle, billed as “Being
the ponderous peddling of Tom Vernon from Muswell Hill to the Mediterranean and
what befell him in the land of the French” His broadcasting style was,
according to radio historian David Hendy, “humorous, gentle and idiosyncratic
in a way that seemed perfectly natural to most Radio Four listeners”.

Fat Man on a Bicycle, Radio Times 13 December 1979

Tom Vernon
was born in London in 1939 and would go first into teaching and then PR. At the
same time he was performing, apparently “moonlighting as a period-costumed
minstrel” and writing music.The
song-writing somehow led to occasional appearances on the Today programme where overnight he’d write a song about a current
news story for broadcast the next day.

He was the
first presenter on BBC Radio London’s breakfast show Rush Hour when the station launched in 1970. Indeed he was
inadvertently the first voice on air when the engineers accidently put out his
rehearsals during test transmissions. As
you’ll hear in the audio clips below Tom also found time to write the Radio
London Song. He also presented In Concert
alongside Michael Oliver in a programme that offered classical music, comment
and criticism and a look at London life in A
Better Place to Live.

At Radio
London he would also read entire Victorian novels on the air, presumably they
had plenty of time to fill. This included the whole of Pickwick Papers which he delivered in 50 episodes and acting 150
different voices, mixing in his own music and sound effects. “I was a one-man
epic,” he recalled. That same rich voice would later go on to record
Dial-a-Santa for the GPO.

The first edition of Feedback 1 April 1979.
Regular hosts after Tom have been Colin Semper,
Chris Dunkley and Roger Bolton

Joining
Radio 4 he was a producer and presenter for the nightly arts strand Kaleidoscope and a contributor to the
review of weekly magazines programme News
Stand. From April 1979 he became the first presenter of Feedback, the “bouquets and brickbats”
programme that took over from the short-lived Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells.Tom remained with Feedback for
four years.

Here’s Tom
Vernon with an edition of Feedback from
10 April 1981 where the burning topic is local and regional radio.

The idea for
a cycle journey across France had its genesis many months before when he’d
bought a second-hand bike at his local Oxfam shop for a fiver. Nicknamed The
Black Pudding – “it was exceedingly heavy and acted as a vehicle for a great
deal of fat” – it remained little used until one day when he was carless he hopped
on it to go shopping, pretty soon he was cycling into the BBC and back.

It was in
July 1979, now on a slimline Evans bicycle, that he set out set off from London
across the Channel and down to La Grande Motte.“Le gros type à vélo”, his
T-shirt proclaimed. Amongst his possession was a mini-Nagra tape recorder
whilst his producer Joy Hatwood followed by car with a large stereo tape
machine to help create their radio verité.Explaining the impetus for the series Tom wrote: “A radio broadcaster is
among the most detached of all. He lives under fluorescent tubes in a
windowless studio, and handles words and ideas on little pieces of magnetic
tape. The temptation is strong to become
more and more a processor of substitute reality, and not very different from a
transistor in his tape machine. I wondered: Is there still a world out there
you can touch?”

Fat Man in Italy, Radio Times 1980

The first
series proved very popular and led to a further four on radio and eight TV
series for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4.

In the 1990s
Tom and his second wife retired to rural France, in the Cévennes. He died last month of a heart attack, aged 74.

In this
audio sequence you’ll hear Tom singing his Radio London song and talking about
the early days of the station. There are clips from Fat Man on a Bicycle and reminiscences from radio producer Jenny de
Yong, who worked on some of the later series. Sadly I have no copies of Tom’s
radio series in my archive but surely they should be accorded a repeat on Radio
4 or Radio 4 Extra.

Tom Vernon
1939-2013

Guide to the Fat Man radio series

Fat Man on a Bicycle

6 part
series from 13 December 1979Fat Man in Italy

6 part
series from 8 December 1980Fat Man Out

4 part
series from 24 June 1981 visiting Helston, Rochester, Appleby, GranthamFat Man at Work

6 part
series from 26 May 1983Fat Man on a Roman Road

8 part
series from 21 August 1983 – a trip from Exeter to Edinburgh

Audio comes
from Mike Brown’s Transdiffusion article on station launches and Radio 4’s Last Word broadcast on 20 September
2013.

Popular Posts

Search This Blog

Total Pageviews

Followers

Radio Today

Audioboom

About Me

Hailing originally from Hull and spending most of my life in East Yorkshire I'm now resident in France.
For over 30 years I've been interested in radio, tv and film and have an archive of off-air recordings and radio-related material.
I'm not the Andy Walmsley that designs sets or produces tv programmes.
Professionally I worked in Local Government.
My wife Val works for Beaux Villages Immobilier.